Political Realities
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: One-shot. Alternate Universe. Somewhat dry piece. In the wake of the third task of the Triwizard Tournament Albus Dumbledore explains to Harry why the previous night he silenced him as soon as he started going on about Voldemort. Warning! Long monologue!


Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following is a scene which takes place in an alternate universe which has just diverged from canon in the wake of Harry's return from the Little Hangleton graveyard in the Triwizard Tournament. The Hogwarts headmaster shut Harry up as fast as possible, and practically dragged him to the infirmary. This piece was inspired by my reading of a section of a story posted by 'Sprinter1988', _Harry Potter: Junior Inquisitor_.

Update, 1st January, 2014: Apologies about the 'wall of text' effect. This piece was written in an MS Word document with text in Times New Roman font, size 12, and it didn't look quite like that in the original. For now, I'm not sure I can do other than apologise for this unintended result of conversion to fanfiction format.

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"Quite clearly injured and possibly delirious, Minister… can't be sure that he knows what he's saying… fullest and most thorough investigation of these claims must of course be made before even commencing to take any actions…"

These phrases, spoken by Dumbledore in an unusually calm and collected voice, swam treacherously through Harry's mind, haunting and interweaving with nightmares of a cackling, triumphant Voldemort, and of the green flash and Cedric's fall.

Harry groaned and surfaced from his sleep, to find himself staring at the too-familiar sight of the ceiling of the Hogwarts infirmary.

He was aching all over, and bandaged in several places.

"Ah! The sleeper awakes!"

Harry heard the familiar unmistakeable tones of the headmaster from somewhere nearby and struggled to sit up. He turned his head to first find and then to glare accusingly at the headmaster.

"Please do not oblige me to silence you as I did last night, Harry, and let me explain myself before you attempt to give any of your own views in response. I am, after all, many times older and far more experienced than yourself of the follies and wickednesses that some humans are, alas, all-too-capable-of, and had good reasons for acting as I did." The headmaster seemed unperturbed by the look that Harry was giving him. "I feel it might benefit you to hear my reasons. I have no means I am prepared to use to force you to _listen_, much less _accept_ unquestioningly what I did, but I can and will certainly ensure that you do not _interrupt_ me in my flow." He had his wand out – even if he was not exactly covering Harry with it at present. "Shall I go on?"

Harry grunted in annoyance and nodded.

"Splendid." the headmaster beamed. "Cornelius – by whom I of course mean our esteemed Minister for Magic – is a political animal, I feel that you should understand, and all too often politicians find themselves being lied to, or told less-than-whole-truths by others hoping to convince them of something or to otherwise use them towards their own ends. Consequently, trust does not necessarily come easily to Cornelius, unless he is confronted with highly convincing evidence or he can persuade himself that it is in his very _obvious_ interests to put aside scepticism. Added to this is that he has in recent years lost much of the trust that he once had in me, and the great store that he equally set by my wisdom. The series of petrifications and the whole Chamber of Secrets affair of two years ago was very much a blot against me in his copy book. I apparently allowed an assassin to move about my school at will, striking at muggle-borns with impunity – which did little to convey a favourable impression of me. Indeed it created an impression that I was either covertly in favour of the attacks, or incompetent; that those petrified were all muggle-borns or half-bloods was truly fortunate for me, as there would have been a political uproar had a pure-blood been so attacked, and Lucius Malfoy would have been able to have me out of Hogwarts much sooner than the date which he eventually achieved. And even once the affair was resolved by your own action and heroic trip to the Chamber, it was not possible for me for a number of reasons to entirely clear away the doubts that lingered in many official minds over what had been going on. I had evidence which I _might_ have presented, but I could not have done so without revealing the full extent of Miss Weasley's involvement in the business. I had other reasons too, I will admit, but the deleterious impact that it would have had upon Miss Weasley's life for the entire truth to have come out was amongst the foremost of my reasons for my reticence with officialdom, and one of the most noble. Had the full facts come to political attention, at the very least Miss Weasley would have been placed under official scrutiny for a period of many painful months, if not sent irrespective of her or her family's wishes for longer-term observation in St. Mungo's – or even detained in Azkaban under the assumption that she had been a willing accomplice to the attacks. I accepted some slight damage to my reputation and influence, as a price I considered worth paying for a quieter life for Miss Weasley. I trust you will not think too badly of me for that, though, alas, my good intentions were to adversely impact my say over what happened in the following school-year. For, as you know, Sirius Black then escaped from Azkaban." Dumbledore paused a moment to consider, and drew a deep breath, before going on. "The Chamber of Secrets affair had raised many questions in ministry minds about my ability to take effective action to protect Hogwarts pupils from harm, and the dementors were in consequence imposed upon the school, literally over my head. The ministry made it clear that if I would not accede to the imposition of guards of their choosing at the school, to watch for Sirius Black, then they would do their best to dismiss me and to impose the guards anyway. I consented to the presence of the dementors, but was able in the doing so to at least argue the ministry away from their original intention which had been for dementors to be active within the school building itself, patrolling on an occasional basis by day and on a much more frequent basis after curfew. The dementors were instead deployed, but stationed only on the perimeter of the grounds. Had the ministry chosen other methods of hunting for Sirius I might have indeed welcomed a much closer investiture of the school's premises, believing as I did that Sirius had been a supremely dangerous and deceitful man who had a decade earlier betrayed his friends and allies, but as I believe the events of the end of the school year subsequently proved, dementors were not to be trusted even around competent adults, much less in proximity to children." He paused a moment, reflecting, then shook his head. "I apologise for becoming drawn off track for a moment or two, Harry, but dementors are something – as I believe a muggle might say – of a 'hobby horse' of mine. At any rate the school year proceeded, and climaxed, as we both know, in the events of one chaotic night beneath the rays of a full-moon, sailing tranquilly through the heavens, unconcerned by the struggles and conflicts of the men and women taking place so far beneath her. That night, Harry, did much to destroy any remaining trust that the Minister himself had for me, and indeed planted seeds of doubt in his mind for the first time concerning yourself and your friends. Sirius Black, a wanted felon, had been apprehended in the vicinity of the grounds but escaped from incarceration within Hogwarts and vanished into the night air, out from under my very nose, before ministry justice could be visited upon him at the appointed hour! Obviously, I was at fault, even if nothing could be proved! And then there was your story – quite wild to the ministry's ears – about Peter Pettigrew. A lot had been staked by the ministry, for a good many months, on the basis of accepting that Sirius Black was in fact a criminal guilty of all the crimes of which he had been accused, and it would be a hard and bitter pill for them to swallow to admit solely on the basis of a schoolboy's tale, that they might have been wrong about him. Especially not on the basis of the tale of a schoolboy who had _attacked and incapacitated a member of the school staff_ – a pupil who does that loses a lot of credibility in the minds of many political listeners, attuned to so often think the worst of people. They gave you some leeway then, on account of your reputation as The-Boy-Who-Lived and convinced themselves that you had probably only acted in such an irresponsible – and to their minds _potentially 'dark'_ – fashion solely because Sirius Black had magically confused you. And it also allowed them to justify, to their own minds, much more easily, the out-of-control behaviour of the servants which _they_ had chosen to impose on the school, in attacking a schoolboy, if the reason for the presence of those servants had been sound all along – it would have looked much worse to many, what the dementors had done or tried to do, if the reason for their presence at the school had been found to be faulty all along. And to round all that off, there was also the scandal of Remus Lupin's transformation, and narrowly averted attack on pupils of the school; no, by the end of the last school year, the ministry told themselves that they had very little reason to trust me at all, any more, or to take anything which I said at face value. After all, I had imperilled, once again, this time by means of a werewolf, pupils under my charge, and allowed – if not outright conspired to cause to happen – Sirius Black to escape; clearly my judgement was not to be trusted, and had the actions of the dementors not to some extent been as much an embarrassment to the ministry as they felt my own actions (assumed or otherwise) to be, I would have come much closer to being permanently dismissed from Hogwarts than I had ever been over the Chamber of Secrets. So much for the last school year. And then we came to the current school year. That I was responsible for the measures supposed to keep those underage from entering the Triwizard Tournament in despite of which your name still came out of the goblet was another mark against me. The ministry wanted the tournament to be nothing but a good-news story – especially after the furores of the previous school years, and the embarrassment of wizarding Britain on the stage of global opinion due to the aftermath of the quidditch world cup. That your name came out of the goblet also raised doubts about you and your motivations, _again_, though the ministry allowed themselves to be soothed by the 'show' that you managed to put on in the first two tasks. Perhaps you were just a bit of an attention-seeker, as some who knew him considered that your father had been, and not a potentially-dark-wizard-in-the-making with sinister designs, they told themselves. But then, last night, you and Mr. Diggory disappeared, only to reappear a short while later, with Mr. Diggory dead, and you babbling something about Lord Voldemort. The ministry and the Minister love peace, Harry. The possibility of being thrust into another war alarms them greatly, and they are not inclined to take anything that I say at face value, right now, for a number of reasons, as I have outlined. To have allowed you to continue to make immediately unverifiable claims last night, or even for myself to have expressed belief in what you were saying, would have done neither of us any favours. At the very least, any case will have to be presented to the ministry with almost incontrovertible evidence, in a manner well-reasoned, and in an atmosphere conducive to calm and rational decision-making. Lord Voldemort – whom, in private I am prepared to accept for a number of very good reasons has indeed returned – is unlikely to be doing anything dramatic any time soon, whilst he collects back his followers once more, and consolidates and reorganises his own powerbase, and I am hopeful, given a number of circumstances, that we will have the time to make a case able to _convince_ the minister as to truly what you experienced last night. However, it is something that we _must take the time to do properly_ and which cannot be rushed. To attempt to force the issue now, would almost certainly lead Cornelius to bury his head in the sand like an ostrich, and to lose us any hope we have to convince him and gain his aid." The headmaster paused, considering for a moment. "I believe that that is all that I have to impart to you on the matter as it currently stands, Harry. Make of my words what you will…"

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Author Notes:

The inspiration for this piece was, as noted above, a section of Sprinter1988's _Harry Potter: Junior Inquisitor_, that story being one which followed canon up to the end of _Goblet of Fire_ before then going off in a different direction. At one point in _Junior Inquisitor_, Harry, looking back on previous events, reflects upon just what Albus Dmbledore did at the end of the tournament to try and 'convince' Cornelius Fudge of Voldemort's 'return'. That actually got me thinking about just how credible a witness Albus Dumbledore (and to a lesser extent Harry) might seem to the Minister for Magic by the end of 1994-195 school year, from which point this piece practically wrote itself. Apologies if the lack of action disappoints some readers, but I wanted to really examine the situation, and a long monologue by the headmaster to Harry seemed the most effective way to do so in fictional form.

It's been some time since I read the original _Prisoner of Azkaban_ and it might be someone other than Harry who knocks Professor Snape out in the Shrieking Shack in canon. Obviously in this universe, it was Harry (or at least that's what ended up getting reported and being the 'official' version).

This is a one-shot.


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